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Re: [LUG] What IS an operating system ?
Hi
I think I might have had a ..... well it hurt my brain anyway. This has
seemed a bit of a fruitless thread until these points were made. If I
understand it correctly. Neil seems to be saying that GNU is the system
upon which OS's are and can be built. If I have understood this
correctly BSD upon which resides Mac OS X relies on GNU and therefore
OS X is GNU based. I suppose Windows could rebuild there whole system
basing it on GNU?!?
Could anybody clarify this for me? It seems that what we are talking
about is a radical shift in how computers are run, should the
revolution truly happen. Basically it seems that if all OSs use GNU,
there would be no lockdowns in terms of use of software. I could buy in
OS X and recompile to run on Linux. Or is that a simplification?
Thanks
Rich
On 20 Jan 2005, at 23:34, Neil Williams wrote:
This is why it is so frustrating to find people getting the wrong side
of the
story and thinking that I'm being petty or generating confusion. The
vast
majority of your system is GNU, NOT Linux.
On the majority of systems, if I came along and took Linux out of your
machine
and slapped in some future version of Hurd or some other GNU-compatible
kernel, you would not even know. A single reboot and Linux would be
replaced.
Don't get me wrong, I like the Linux kernel and there is no direct
equivalent
as yet - but the kernel, in many ways, is just another application
that uses
GNU, the *system* is GNU.
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